Get to Know Drowners, the Rock Band Harry Styles Keeps Tweeting About

Oh, and the lead singer's a model. So...yeah.

If you don’t recognize Matt Hitt as the charming, ebullient frontman of New York City rock band Drowners, you’ll undoubtedly know him from from his numerous turns down the runways of Prada and Saint Laurent, or from his ads for fashion brands ranging from Gucci to Gap (fellow online shopping addicts know he’s been all over the latter’s website this summer).

With his impossibly tall frame and even more impossible cheekbones, posing professionally was sort of a no-brainer for Matt, but it’s music he’s always been interested in and not, he emphatically explains, modeling. "If you’re a guy and you grow up wanting to be a model, I think that’s pretty disgusting," he says. "I hadn’t even considered it, but then once I started doing it, I was like, ’OK, this is a good way to pay my rent.’ But I’m quite an embarrassed person. You know when it’s your birthday and everyone’s like, ’Happy birthday!’ and all eyes are on you, and you’re like, ’God, I wish I wasn’t in the spotlight right now’? It’s a bit like that. It felt like a birthday party I didn’t want to go to."

These days, Matt doesn’t need the modeling gigs to pay his rent—after dropping Drowners’ debut self-titled album last spring, the foursome has been touring all over the world, and grabbing attention everywhere they go. They even caught the eye of Harry Styles, who recently tweeted lyrics to their hit, "Long Hair"...

...which you can listen to below. The next morning, Matt woke up to a flurry of text messages alerting him to his new famous fan. "I don’t know how he came across it," Matt says of Harry. "I met him once years ago, but I don’t know him." As expected, Drowners now have way more Directioners following them on Twitter than they did a few weeks ago. For what it’s worth, the feeling is mutual. Though he’s more of a punk-band kind of guy, Matt occasionally listens to their hits. In his words: "I pull ’em up on the YouTube now and then. A lot of time, those pop stars have the best songwriters working for them, so I’m a fan of good pop music."

Drowners, for their part, writes their own tunes, and they’ve already started penning new material for their follow-up album. "I find it difficult to write on tour, so we took a few weeks off and then we just started messing around with some new stuff a few weeks ago," Matt says. "The first record was half written before I met the band, and it was mostly just me. This one is consciously a more collaborative effort, so it’s coming out a bit slower and a bit darker." A single or two are slated for later this year, but if you’re lucky enough to catch them live, you’ll hear their latest tunes even sooner. (The dudes will be headlining Dr. Martens’s just-announced fall tour, which will take them to 21 cities across America, so get your tickets stat.)

They haven’t started playing new music just yet, but one thing’s for sure: The second Drowners starts jamming, the crowd will know every single word to every single song.